It does matter, but... hmm...
These dunbar numbers thing has some sense on the topic...  

 Since only about 2% of npubs engage, and the rest lurk or are bots, you're ability to interact well would max out at circa 7500 npubs. Seems accurate. 

 Lets say for starters it could stop matter when one realizes the numbers are made up of bots or zombie accounts...
Maybe lets say later it matters the precise number of followers for both to be useful and to offer a token of credibility 

 It's not the precise number listed, that's important. It's that having followers allows you to post something and have someone respond because they can see your notes. And more followers mean more people might respond.

Not everyone on here is so autistic, that they enjoy talking to themselves all day. And that's an absolutely fucking outrageous thing to demand from people using a

*checks notes*

social media app. 

 I think there's no current debugging for that other than living irl in the same neighborhood and even so... well.
But yes is true that to engage this way is a must of the thing, otherwise it turns a foss bedtable diary of un attended dreams but properly logged 

 LOL fr

People literally like, "I've just been talking to myself, every day on here, for 8 months, and it's been great. I don't need any followers."

That's not an opinion, it's a diagnosis. 

 Exactly 👆this 

 Welcome back. You have one more follower. She's unusually active. 

  https://image.nostr.build/a97cc9916de5f55b41a56d77452a02e56c83800f1d0f660a5ec0ea09fed2e91c.jpg  

 Of my 1k+ followers there's only about 50 people who I actually interact with 

 And how many would be responding, if you were your only follower? 

 It would make more sense to refer to them as subscribers rather than followers and people say follower counts don't matter because a lot of them are bots, dummy accounts, etc, and also because you can't get a true count of them since your only getting those numbers from the relays you ask.

If you post to a blastr relay like I do then you probably have subscribers on other relays that you don't read from that you don't even know about. 

What does matter is reputation. It takes time and effort to build a reputation and you don't want to just throw that away.  

 A reputation... with whom? With followers, correct? 

 With people who choose to read your posts. Followers connotes a captive audience which is legacy social media influencer garbage.

Throw away the influencer mindset and just start conversations with people.  

 5% response rate is actually quite high. It probably will get lower, as the number gets bigger, and more of the followers are inactive, autofollows, or bots. 

 I almost commented something like this.

How about:
Use getwired.app as your main client. 

Or make a new npub called John and have a bitcoin ai image on there as your avatar... and continue to post as you normally would lol.

Let's not pretend nostr is free of parasocial dynamics. It's clearly not. Some have been made here and some are carried over from twitter. It's just the reality of it. 

Just as an aside... I really would like to see a client enable features like turn off all notifications of likes and zaps. Replies/reposts only. (Not saying this isn't also part of it). 

 I started out twice, on here, as a nobody, with only myself as a follower.

I could do it again, but I could also bang my head against the wall until I faint, or poke needles into my eyeballs, and I can't tell which prospect is more appealing. 

 But also in which client or by what service those astronomical numbers appear? Cant remember one beyond the 6 figures  

 Those are the nearly-accurate follower numbers, from nostr.band. The question is more, how many of those followers are active, human npubs.

That's still very high, but probably 20k, instead of 200k. 

 That i can believe.
And so i can not believe the million of daily active numbers at blueskies.
Numbers dont add up.
To have access to internet is one thing, however a different one is the criticisim built by users.
3% of mexican population has access to internet as in domestic appliance. Even so those are a jillion chungus quantity of people. From those, real mexicans ive seen here probably a dozen or two.
 

 There's only really 5000 people using the Internet. I've long suspected it.

I find my own entries, when Googling for topics and it's like, wait... nobody else... in 14 years?

https://media.tenor.com/g1GMsYiO7ZEAAAAC/anyone-online-gaming.gif 

 Especially now that @Lux has made it super easy to post to #nostr with one-time burner npubs

https://anonostr.com 

 This is your app, folks. 

 How does this work? And if it’s a new post every time then what’s the point ? 

 Think of it like one of those anon boards where people post confessions, or throwaways on Reddit 

 https://i.nostr.build/9QPIcZhtfjzxPrLz.png 

 My thoughts: UI don't really care about my follower count. On a censorship resistant network you have no way to know how many of them are unique people that actually see what you say. And if what I have to say is interesting to a dozen people, I'm happy.

Follow counts though... If someone follows more people than they could possibly read, it means them following me means nothing. They're probably never going to see anything I say, and it means they don't really care to. Following me isn't about seeing what I say to those people, it's about me thinking they like me for some reason. If you follow so many people that you can't possibly read what they all said on the last 24 hours on, say, 30 minutes, you're either terminally online or you don't actually read what they say. Best case scenario your signal to noise ratio is probably horrible. I like people with low follow counts.